Texas Instruments Incorporated announced its new CC2541 Bluetooth low energy system-on-chip (SoC), aimed at Bluetooth Smart sensor applications for consumer medical, sports and fitness, security, entertainment and home automation. The SoC offers a 33 percent reduction in power consumption compared to TI's previous-generation CC2540 SoC when transmitting at 1 milliwatt output power, while maintaining robust RF performance. The Soc is pin-to-pin compatible with the CC2540, which allows manufacturers to take advantage of the power savings through an easy migration of existing designs.

TI's new Bluetooth low energy solution will be demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week (Jan. 10-13). In its meeting space (N116, Las Vegas Convention Center North Hall), TI will also give a sneak-peek of its upcoming CC2541DK-SENSOR development kit for Android- and iOS-based smartphone applications. The kit opens up the world of Bluetooth low energy-based sensors to smartphone application developers because it requires no RF hardware knowledge or embedded software programming on the sensor-application side. The six sensors included in the kit enable applications such as tag trackers, thermostats, weather stations, theft alarms, remote controls and others that can be controlled by a consumer's smartphone.